[Nhcoll-l] Requesting letters of support - Brazil´s National Museum

[Ruy Alves]

Dear colleagues,



As you are aware, on September 2nd last year the Brazilian National Museum
palace (in Rio) burned down but not everything housed in it was lost.
Currently rescue parties recover specimens which escaped the fire either
intact or with some degree of damage, on a daily basis. Evidently the
disaster sparked a series of investigations by Brazilian Authorities
(mostly still under way).

            The Brazilian Federal Audit Court (*Tribunal de Contas da União*
- *TCU*), for instance, demands the Museum to produce a full annual
inventory of collections.

The Audit Court insists that the Museum disobeyed the law by not
implementing complete annual inventories, invoking a law from 2009 (see
link below) which was quite evidently designed by someone who cared about
art museums. To the best of our knowledge you can count statues and
pictures by Picasso etc. on the wall with some precision, but not
individual diatoms in every vial, plants on every voucher, pinned insects
in every drawer.

We have pretty much ceased our research to cope with this unusual demand
for overly meticulous inventory from the Audit Court, to the best of our
knowledge unprecedented in natural history museums worldwide.

With the aforementioned pointlessness for annual inventory in natural
history museums, could you, as an experient curator/director/researcher
(and maybe some of your peers we don´t have e-mails of) kindly send us a
letter saying so and how your institution deals with Museum input-output?
Could you please inform if you do an annual inventory of your collection?
This will be of great help for us.



Link to Law 11.904/2009:
http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2007-2010/2009/Lei/L11904.htm





With my kind regards!





Ruy José Válka Alves, Curator, R-Herbarium.
*Ruy J. V. Alves*, Prof. Titular, PhD, *Curador do Herbário R*
*Laboratório de Florística e Biogeografia Insular & Montana*,
[image: Displaying]
Departamento de Botânica,
Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
Quinta da Boa Vista s./no., São Cristóvão,
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 20940-040, BRASIL,
tel. 21+*39381145*

"*Never put away a specimen unlabeled, not even for an hour, you may forget
it or die.*" - Elliott Coues - Field and General Ornithology (1890)

For herbarium-related subjects please visit
http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/dptbot/herbario.html or e-mail
herbarior at gmail.com
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